Back in the Balkans
I had the opportunity earlier this week to revisit Bosnia, the country where I started my professional career in the 1990s. Returning to Sarajevo was a wonderful mixture of the familiar and the novel. The new airport terminal is impressive. English is widely-spoken, the taxis metered and the police have body-worn cameras, no doubt to reassure the public (and protect officers). There were new buildings everywhere but also places I remembered and frequented in the past. I was pleased to see the Ćevabdžinica (best described as a small restaurant selling traditional Bosnian grilled minced meat) Galatasaray is still running, with the owner (the Bosnian former goalkeeper for Turkish football club Galatasaray) still welcoming his guests, glass of wine in hand.
I encountered a diverse range of visitors during my stay, from large groups of Chinese and Panamanian guests to a wonderful group of ladies who had come all the way from Australia. I had a chance to take the cable car up to Trebević, the mountain from where the Bosnian Serbs enforced the siege of Sarajevo during the war. The very matter-of-fact ‘Visit Sarajevo’ website reassures the amateur hiker like myself that ‘Marked trails are not technically demanding in general, and are free from landmines’. Well, that is a relief. I spent a wonderful couple of hours walking back down to Sarajevo, including the length of the former bobsleigh piste from the 1984 Winter Olympics, now covered in graffiti. The spray-painted concrete reminded me of visiting the Berlin wall in early 1990. Just before re-entering Sarajevo, in the neighbourhood of Bistrik (close to the Sarajevo brewery), I came across European-plated cars outside houses that were being repaired and renovated, removing evidence of the former conflict as former refugees return to rebuild, something I have seen ongoing for a generation as the city and country reconstitutes itself, imperfectly, but inexorably.
With elections around the corner, elements of continuity on the political scene were confirmed by posters of (another) Izetbegović, Bakir, the son of Alija Izetbegović, the first democratically elected President of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Meanwhile in the Serbian entity that forms part of the post-war construct that is modern Bosnia, the scene is still dominated by Bosnian Serb politician Milorad Dodik. When I knew him well in the 1990s and used to visit him at his home in Laktaši, he was a moderate. He has evolved into an ardent Serb nationalist and authoritarian, repeatedly advocating for secession of the Bosnian Serb entity, Republika Srpska, that along with the Federation (comprising the majority of the Bosnian Muslim/Bosniak and Bosnian Croat populations) make up the awkward jigsaw of modern Bosnia Hercegovina. Watching the reverence for the deceased Bosnian Serb leader Ratko Mladić at his funeral in Serbia this week, or the shameful lionising of this convicted war criminal by the fans of the Serbian football team Red Star Belgrade (who displayed a huge image of Mladić with the chant ‘pravac Potočari’ - ‘direction Potočari’ – a reference to the site of the Srebrenica massacre that Mladić directed) reminded one of how much conflict management, promotion of accountability and international effort is still required to keep the peace in the Balkans.
This month it is 30 years since I started working on issues of peace and security, starting with Northern Ireland and Cyprus and then going through the gamut of the Balkans, the West Bank and Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia. Yemen, Haiti, Nigeria, Syria, Lebanon and a few others. We tend to be highly self-critical of external attempts to support countries impacted by conflict, however well-intentioned. Returning to Bosnia this week, I remain very aware of these challenges and the shortcomings, but also that peace, a peace that needs constant nurturing and improvement, is worth the effort and that societies can recover but are more likely to do so with our collective support. I am writing this in Turkey, from where I was involved in efforts to support the opposition to the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. In the week that also commemorates the 9/11 attacks, the fact that Syria’s President is a former jihadist and Al-Qaida commander is not the post-Assad future many worked hard to realise, but it is a lot better than the brutal dictatorship of the Assad dynasty.
I am flying this evening to Beirut, where ongoing contestation over national identity, religious co-existence and the malign influence of foreign agendas (from all sides) can, as in Syria and Bosnia, prompt feelings of hopelessness and pessimism. Lebanon, a country that is at once pre-conflict, in-conflict and post-conflict still persists in spite of its civil war and strife that has beset this beautiful but confounding country since I first arrived twenty years ago. Bosnia, a complex, fragile democracy, is immeasurably more functional now then when I first visited. Syria is beset by problems, from economic collapse to the legacy of a brutal sectarian conflict, but it is still better off than when the government dropped chemical weapons on its own people or shovelled thousands into ovens and mass graves.
With the dismantling of international assistance programmes, the fraying of multilateralism and the erosion of international legal and human rights norms, we are witnessing once again the rise of authoritarianism, nativism and populism. If not for our shared humanity, then for naked self-interest, we should reject this retrenchment. Conflict, migration, organised crime, terrorism, pandemics and climate change impact us all and know no borders. No fence, visa regime, policy or polemic is going to keep them out. There is no alternative to empathy, understanding, collaboration, burden sharing and commitment to act, something that was reinforced by the stops on my journey this week and over the past three decades.